2-12-10 Community Call Minutes

The meeting began at 2:05pm and was attended by:John Volpe, Elise Passikoff, Soo Cee Lee, Greg Miller and Diane Joiner.

Now that OurMed has signed the contract with Blueliner, a Tech Committee is being formed.

Greg asked John Volpe if he could confirm being the liaison between Content and Tech. Elise mentioned how Vincent had already asked Blueliner for an agenda and that the “core” tech team would work on answering their questions.

Then Elise mentioned how a rep from each committee could be in the core group. For example, if we had a marketing committee, that marketing rep could determine where the donation button should ideally get placed on a page that would bring forward the marketing strategy.

Elise suggested that what would happen is that Blueliner will come back to us with a lot of questions about content for categorizations, article approval process, etc. A liason would be helpful between the two committees.

John asked if work on that had already been done. Greg mentioned how last Summer much of the work was compiled into an RFP which is the basis for the contract between Blueliner and OurMed. Within the RFP, there is the categorization and process details. Greg will distribute to the callers (and Tony Wasserman) and anyone else who requests it (greg.miller@ourmed.org)

Greg commented on how important it will be to have a content committee. For example, there has been a few articles on the site recently posted by an unknown author that at first appeared as spam. “BlueStar” wrote an article with a link to “Thirdhandsmoke.” Greg first thought this was spam but when he looked more into it, saw that it was actually a valid article about a new study of how tobacco residue on clothing / upholstery can cause cancer. So a content committee will be useful to discern what is graffiti and what is valid.

John ventured that BlueStar might be someone from Blueliner because of the name.

Soo Cee agrees that “Greg brings up a valid point” – some of the content from some diseases look strange but is medically accurate for example.

Greg confirmed that the callers all have user accounts. He asked if it was clear on how to create new articles. “You simply search for an article and then if it doesn’t exist, you can click on a link to create it”. He reported how Stan thought that having a simple button “Share your Experience” would be a an easy-add-button but the programmer in Indian said that the programming was too complex because it is a 2step process…First checking to see if an article existed and then added it as a new URL.

Elise suggested that the Content committee should start meeting separately. During these meetings then someone you could have the questions already ready for the core group.

John asked who would lead the committee and Greg said that we don’t have anyone yet. Geoff Hayden was too busy and possibly Richard—Richard suggested going forward with the Symbiosis project in a 5 phase approach to build content. Although he doesn’t have a background in medicine/healthcare, he’d be good to have help build content from other free license sites and could attract wiki authors—but first we need the wiki upgraded.

John suggested that also the content committee chair have clear Roles and responsibilities written out.

Elise – then content can be looked at and fined tuned before moved over to new site. Talking about maintenance that would be the maintenance role as well.

John – And before that person takes on that responsibility. And you could ask them their ideas.

Greg said we need more medical professionals and offered to get in touch with Vanessa Moore to recruit more.

Monday afternoon seemed like a better day for the content committee meeting. As this Monday is Presidents Day, it may better to shoot for Feb 22nd at 4pm. Elise won’t be able to make the call on Friday.

Soo Cee will be in Chicago from Feb 16 to Feb 28th. She wished everyone “Gong Hee Bot Choi” which translates as “Happy Chinese New Year!”